Angela Carella: When your neighbors are tomatoes

On Hubbard Avenue in the middle of Stamford, the unthinkable is happening.

Three and a half acres have been cleared, but not to build houses. The land will be used to grow vegetables, herbs, flowers, maybe apple trees.

The owner is putting in a farm.

On a street where stately homes are on the market for $600,000 to $800,000, in a neighborhood adjacent to downtown and Bull's Head, this doesn't happen.

What is the owner thinking?

"For all these years houses have been taking farmland away. We want to reverse it. We want to take farmland back from houses," said Bruce Sclafani, whose family runs Sclafani Brands, a food importing business started in Stamford 101 years ago.

Sclafani's parents owned a portion of the Hubbard Avenue lot and, according to city records, he purchased the adjacent property at 190 Hubbard Ave. in January for $580,000. He intended to build houses, but he got another idea.

"When I was in Italy, I saw a city built around a 700-year-old vineyard," said Sclafani, who travels there regularly to check products his company imports. "The vineyard came first, and the city respected it."

That sat well with Sclafani, who is disturbed by things he sees in the food business.

"There'll be a can with a label saying it contains San Marzano tomatoes, but they are not San Marzano tomatoes," Sclafani said of the variety considered best for sauce. "The big chain stores don't care what's in the cans. They just want a cheap price."

In 2008, Sclafani Brands, run by Bruce and his three brothers, Lou, Gus and Ron, led an effort that ended with Connecticut becoming the first state to adopt standards for olive oil.

Lou Sclafani saw stores selling olive oil labeled extra virgin for $10 when the market price was close to $30. He bought some, had it analyzed and learned it was 90 percent soybean oil and 10 percent pomace oil, a low-grade olive oil. He fought for a state law requiring that imported olive oil meet International Olive Council standards.

After that, New York, California and Oregon adopted similar standards, and other states are considering it.

But it's worse than a lack of truth in labeling, Bruce Sclafani said.

"You see pictures on television of chicken factories a mile long. You hear about `pink slime,' where they mechanically separate meat, then take the bone, the cartilage and the skin and grind it all up till it's like soft ice cream. Then they clean it with ammonia. And the government says that's fine."

It's not fine, Sclafani said.

"Industrial producers grow tomatoes on the ground so they can be picked with machines. When you do that, you get rocks and dirt, so they use more machines to separate that out. That can make the tomatoes soft," Sclafani said. "To harden them up, they use calcium chloride, which they're also sneaking into olives, pickles, a lot of other things. Calcium chloride is what we use to melt snow."

Sclafani questions why we think it's OK to eat that.

"You can't industrialize food. If you want cheap cars, fine, industrialize. But you can't do that with tomatoes or eggs or beef," he said. "We got too far away from our food. We have to go back."

That's why a bit of news in New Canaan, where Sclafani lives, caught his ear. In December a New Canaan farmer named Randy Brown went out of business after 10 years when a neighbor complained about the vegetables and flowers he was growing and selling nearby.

Sclafani decided to invite Brown to farm on Hubbard Avenue. City zoning officials told them Stamford allows farming in the R-20 zone, Sclafani and Brown said.

"Farming has always been such a basic right that in general it has never been excluded or restricted by municipalities," Brown said. "As municipalities developed they didn't change regulations about farming because there was no need. All the pressure was to build buildings, not farms."

So now, on residential Hubbard Avenue, 1,000 tomato plants are growing, including some San Marzanos from seeds that come from Italy. The lettuce is seeded and peppers are growing in long beds of topsoil. Pumpkins and winter squash, now tiny shoots, will be ready to eat in the fall.

Sclafani would like to convert his parents' old home on the property into a place to hold classes on growing food, and add greenhouses and perhaps an apple orchard.

Zoning officials told him that "as long as you grow it here, you can sell it here," so he plans to open a farm stand.

The tomatoes and peppers should be ready in August.

"I think we have to get back to basics. We have to understand food again," Sclafani said. "I wish everybody could go to Italy and see what they eat. The food goes from the garden to the table, not from the garden to the processing plant to the ripening room."

Brown said Americans have tried "to apply the mass production techniques of the Industrial Age to farming and it just doesn't work." People see him staking plants, checking their progress and caring for the soil and they develop a trust, Brown said.

"That's nice," he said. "It's something they can't feel in a supermarket."

Sclafani said it's time to get back to basics.

"You'll be able to walk through fresh peppers right in the middle of Stamford," Sclafani said. "Why can't a city and a farm co-exist?"